Around 400 Russian soldiers killed in missile attack, says Ukraine

The attack hit a building in Makiivka - a city in Russia-occupied Donetsk region - where Russian forces were said to be stationed

Ukraine said around 400 Russian soldiers have died in a missile attack on the occupied Donetsk region. Russian officials contested the figure, admitting only to 63 of their troops being killed. Neither claim has been verified. 
 

The attack hit a building in the city of Makiivka, where Russian forces were stationed. It is extremely rare for battlefield casualties to be confirmed by Moscow.
 

Russia’s defence ministry said 63 soldiers had died in the fiery blast which destroyed a temporary barracks in a former vocational college in Makiivka, twin city of the Russian-occupied regional capital of Donetsk.
 

It said the accommodation had been hit by four rockets fired from US-made HIMARS launchers, claiming two rockets had been shot down. Kyiv said the Russian death toll was in the hundreds, though  pro-Russian officials called this an exaggeration.
 

Russian military bloggers, many with hundreds of thousands of followers, said the huge destruction was a result of storing ammunition in the same building as a barracks, despite commanders knowing it was within range of Ukrainian rockets.
 

Separately, Ukraine said on Monday it had shot down all 39 drones Russia had launched in an unprecedented third straight night of air strikes against civilian targets in Kyiv and other cities. Ukrainian officials said their success proved that Russia’s tactic in recent months of raining down air strikes to knock out Ukraine's energy infrastructure was increasingly a failure as Kyiv beefs up its air defences. Unverified footage posted online of the aftermath of the Makiivka strike on the Russian barracks showed a huge building reduced to smoking rubble. Igor Girkin, a former commander of pro-Russian troops in east Ukraine, said the death toll was in the 100s.

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